What happens when beauty intersects with horror? In her newest nonfiction collection, Jehanne Dubrow interrogates the ethical questions that arise when we aestheticize atrocity. The daughter of US diplomats, she weaves memories of growing up overseas among narratives centered on art objects created while working under oppressive regimes. Ultimately Exhibitions is a collection concerned with how art both evinces and elicits emotion and memory and how, through the making and viewing of art, we are--for better or for worse--changed.

Even in peacetime, many women find themselves isolated in a wartime of their own when their loved ones are involved in conflicts overseas. As mothers or wives they live in a state of separation, from husbands, sons or daughters in permanent danger - or so they feel - as well as from an often alienating everyday world of people who have no idea of what anxieties and fears grip them every minute. They also find themselves switching back and forth between two time zones, between the present moment and what might have been happening several hours ago in the Middle East. Home Front presents the poetry of four such women, Bryony Doran and Isabel Palmer, both mothers of young British soldiers serving in Afghanistan; and two American poets, Jehanne Dubrow, wife of a serving US naval officer deployed to the Persian Gulf and other conflict zones, and Elyse Fenton, wife of a US army medic posted to Iraq. It brings together four full-length collections by these writers; those by the two British poets are debut collections first published in full in this book. The poems in Bryony Doran's Bulletproof tell a chronological story, from her son's unexpected decision to join the army through his tours in and returns from Afghanistan. Covering every emotion from fear to fury, yet lifted by humour and details of everyday domestic life, these are poems written to preserve a pacifist mother's sanity as each day plays itself out. They show her coping with The News, her fantasies, his short spells of home leave, and her realisation that both are imprisoned in a modern myth. The narrative in Isabel Palmer's Atmospherics begins with seeing her only son go to war in Afghanistan soon after his 21st birthday in 2011 and ends with his final, safe return in 2015. His role there was to lead foot patrols and to operate machines for detecting improvised explosive devices. While he was on tour, she wrote one poem every week reflecting on their experiences. The earlier poems appeared in Ground Signs (Flarestack Poets, 2014), a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. Driven by intellectual curiosity and emotional exploration, the poems in Jehanne Dubrow's Stateside (2010) are remarkable for their subtlety, sensual imagery and technical control. The speaker attempts to understand her own life through the long history of military wives left to wait and wonder, invoking Penelope's plight in Homer's Odyssey as a model but also as a source of mystery. Dubrow is fearless in her contemplation of the far-reaching effects of war but even more so in her excavation of a marriage under duress. At times quiet, at others cacophonous, the poems of Elyse Fenton's Clamor turn a lyric lens on the language we use to talk about war and atrocity, and the irreconcilable rifts - between lover and beloved, word and thing - such work unearths. Originally published in the US - but not in the UK - in 2010, Clamor was the first book of poetry to win Britain's Dylan Thomas Prize.

Taste is a lyric meditation on one of our five senses, which we often take for granted. Structured as a series of "small bites," the book considers the ways that we ingest the world, how we come to know ourselves and others through the daily act of tasting. Through flavorful explorations of the sweet, the sour, the salty, the bitter, and umami, Jehanne Dubrow reflects on the nature of taste. In a series of short, interdisciplinary essays, she blends personal experience with analysis of poetry, fiction, music, and the visual arts, as well as religious and philosophical texts. Dubrow considers the science of taste and how taste transforms from a physical sensation into a metaphor for discernment. Taste is organized not so much as a linear dinner served in courses but as a meal consisting of meze, small plates of intensely flavored discourse.

Taste is a lyric meditation on one of our five senses, which we often take for granted. Structured as a series of "small bites," the book considers the ways that we ingest the world, how we come to know ourselves and others through the daily act of tasting. Through flavorful explorations of the sweet, the sour, the salty, the bitter, and umami, Jehanne Dubrow reflects on the nature of taste. In a series of short, interdisciplinary essays, she blends personal experience with analysis of poetry, fiction, music, and the visual arts, as well as religious and philosophical texts. Dubrow considers the science of taste and how taste transforms from a physical sensation into a metaphor for discernment. Taste is organized not so much as a linear dinner served in courses but as a meal consisting of meze, small plates of intensely flavored discourse.

Wild Kingdom explores the world of academia, examining this strange landscape populated by faculty, administrators, and students. Using what she calls ""received academic forms,"" Jehanne Dubrow crafts poems that recall the language of academic documents such as syllabi, grading rubrics, and departmental minutes. ""Honor Board Hearing,"" a series of prose poems, depicts challenges frequently faced by undergraduates, offering fictionalized accounts of cases involving plagiarism, theft, sexual assault, and substance abuse. As a rejoinder to the famous dictum that ""academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low,"" Dubrow maintains that, given the current moment, the stakes could not be higher. Even as it acknowledges the cruelty that exists within the academy, Wild Kingdom asks how scholars and educators can work to ensure that institutions of higher learning continue to nurture students and remain places of rigorous critical thinking.

Magazine. Poetry. Fiction. Literary Nonfiction. Art. ABLE MUSE Winter 2013 continues the tradition of masterfully crafted poetry, fiction, essays, art & photography, and book reviews that have become synonymous with ABLE MUSE online and in print. After more than a decade of online publishing excellence, ABLE MUSE print edition maintains the superlative standard of the work presented all these years in the online edition, and, the ABLE MUSE ANTHOLOGY (Able Muse Press, 2010).CONTENTS: 2013 ABLE MUSE WRITE PRIZE FOR POETRY & FICTION Includes the winning story and poems from the contest winners and finalists. With the winner and runner-up sonnets from the 2013 Able Muse / Eratosphere Sonnet Bake-OffEDITORIAL--Alexander Pepple FEATURED ARTIST--Peter SvenssonFEATURED POET--Jehanne Dubrow (Interviewed by Anna M. Evans)FICTION--Cheryl Diane Kidder, Charles Wilkinson, Blaine Vitallo, Donna Laemmlen ESSAYS--A.E. Stallings, Peter Byrne, Philip Morre, David Mason, Chrissy Mason. BOOK REVIEWS--Rory Waterman, Jane HammonsPOETRY--Rachel Hadas, R.S. Gwynn, Catharine Savage Brosman, John Savoie, D.R. Goodman, Jeanne Wagner, Richard Wakefield, Melissa Balmain, Tara Tatum, Anna M. Evans, Matthew Buckley Smith, Stephen Harvey, Elise Hempel, Marly Youmans, Amanda Luecking Frost, Rachael Briggs, Chris Childers, James Matthew Wilson, Alex Greenberg, Catullus, Sappho, Theocritus ." . . ABLE MUSE ] fills an important gap in understanding what is really happening in early twenty-first century American poetry."--Dana Gioia

"There's a tensile strength of line here-predominantly pentameter-that underscores the ease of the poetic idiom: just as the heartfelt yet disciplined feeling-life of the content underwrites this collection's larger themes of Judaism and its ancient traditions. The Hardship Post has a good deal on its mind as well as the load in its heart. Polish history and heritage may be one personal focus, but displacement and identity are the greater subjects. First books don't usually take on the world at this level of seriousness and skill." -Stanley Plumly "I admire Jehanne Dubrow's poems not only for the poise and beauty of her lines, but also for the way she grapples with big subjects: inheritance and home, the cultural and the personal. A bearer of tradition, she also knows what it's like to lose herself in modernity. 'I don't belong where bodies separate / from minds like sand trying to leave behind / the sea.' Poems become strands of continuity stretched almost to breaking by mobility. Dubrow seems to have lived everywhere-and that is precisely where The Hardship Post should be read." -David Mason "At the place where the cruelties of history and those of story intersect, Jehanne Dubrow has staked a claim. These are poems of emotional intensity under formal control. An impressive first collection." -Linda Pastan